Feed Toby the Dog with a Simple Tweet

Being awayfrom home causes a lot of trouble when you have pets that depend on you. Nat Morris, an IT guy decided that he wanted to come up with a solution to this problem. In his solution he developed a way to feed the dog based on twitter posts. All he would have to do is tweet a “feed Toby” message and a dispenser would let food into the bowl for his pup. He eventually opened this up and anyone who tweeted this message would end up feeding Toby. A great concept. As Nat explains it…

“Theres a Nanode microcontroller (an Arduino clone with ENC28J60 ethernet), LCD screen from an old Dell laser printer, the stepper motor mechanism is out of a HP Deskjet 500 from the 90′s. The stepper is controlled via a ULN2003 and a 555 timer is used for the buzzer. Theres a pair of IP cameras (ones broke at the moment) and a server process which polls twitter and co-ordinates it all.”